Mafia, in the programs of the parties the word is not there

Mafia (or rather, mafias) there is little talk in this election campaign that risks being remembered for the paucity of content, reduced to simple cards to be spread on social media. Wired he analyzed the programs of the main political forces on the issue. The judgment is merciless. Of Cosa Nostra Siciliana, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, Sacra Corona Unita, Stidda, Nigerian, Chinese, Albanian mafia, agromafie and eco-mafia – you try to keep the account – it is hard to say something that goes beyond banality. Sometimes the topic is skipped, as if it didn’t exist.

The presence of the clans it’s everywhere. And they bind to politics, entrepreneurship, institutions, deviant Freemasonry. “We specify the adjective ‘deviated’ – the prosecutor of Catanzaro Nicola Gratteri often jokes – so no one can denounce us“. The southern economy is strangled by this tangled tanglein which each page of a judicial inquiry can lead to well-known, lesser-known and well-known names. There is a lack of industrieswho, to settle down, have to make agreements with club leaders, hire staff reported by bosses, pay bribes of hundreds of thousands of euros. There is a lack of infrastructure and those that are there are useless. Like the port of Gioia Tauro, which should have brought work and development to the homonymous plain and instead has always been crushed by the ‘ndrine. An aerial view from the municipality of Nicotera shows tens of square kilometers without logistic infrastructures, of those processing and transformation companies that one might reasonably expect. Only a few fruit import-export companies, one of the channels used to ship cocaine from South America to Italy, from where the ‘Ndrangheta supplies all of Europe because it is able to speak on an equal footing with Colombian cartels. Containers are used to build underground bunkers where the bosses find refuge.

A turnover of 220 billion

It is difficult to estimate the turnover of the Italian mafias: Eurispes, a research institute, speaks of 220 billion of Euro. But there are those who believe the figure implausiblelike Francesco Calderoni, associate professor of sociology of deviance in the faculty of political and social sciences of the Catholic University of Milan, so the correct figure is around 11 billion. Still, a lot of money.

The pandemic has made the situation worse. And it is precisely at this moment that the transition to the legal economy of cosche e ‘ndrine takes place, the only realities to have liquid money in times of crisis. As in 2008. Always Gratteri explained it well. “A gentleman approaches the entrepreneur in difficulty who, with persuasive action, offers an immediate loan. If he accepts, it’s over. He will have a hard time paying the interest, so the mafioso will not ask for more money: he will directly take control of the businessperhaps leaving it in the name of the rightful owner“. It is therefore camouflaged, an outpost for the recycling of dirty money almost impossible for the investigators to identify. The political issue would be that of access to credit, often impossible for companies in difficulty. But nobody talks about it in the programs. Gratteri’s advice is simple: “Those who fail can start over: those who put themselves in the hands of the mafia remain marked for life“.

The mafia in the north and the prefect who denied it

But the ‘ndrine have gone up the boot reaching the north. It was the seventieswhen the boss Natale Iamonte arrived in his obligatory living room in Desio, in Brianza, and founded what would become one of the main ‘ndrangheta’ clubs. Today, in the shadow of the Madonnina, Calabrian crime commands. Who has his hands all over the place. Earth moving, tenders, major events. “The mafia does not exist in Milan“, stated in January 2010 the then prefect Gian Valerio Lombardi: six months later, in July, the maxi-operation Crime Infinito nailed hundreds of people and established for the first time in a ruling that the clans were there.

Every construction site is at risk, and the measures taken to date are of little use. “I submitted my offer to carry out works at Expo 2015, respecting all the safety procedures in order not to be identified – tells a Wired an entrepreneur, under guarantee of anonymity -. I had won the tender, I was happy. A few days later I get a phone call on my mobile. An unknown voice proves to know everything: I ask him how he does it, but he closes the conversation by telling me to say hello to his wife and children, and even giving me the home address. My lawyer advised me to give up“. It was held in Milan on July 5th the first anti ‘Ndrangheta demonstration outside Calabria: one hundred and fifty associations from all over Italy, significantly, met at the Central Station, near the offices of the Region.